Is it really nearly that time already? I had an incredible time at the London Porn Film Festival last year. I discovered hot new porn, hung out with delightful porn friends, recorded a podcast and faced my fears in screening a 90 minute retrospective of my work, which was simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. The submission deadline has rolled around again, and if you haven't yet got your films in, you have until this Sunday, 20th January.

This year, the festival are particularly seeking films by and about sex workers; non-western centred films; documentaries; political porn; animations; and archival work.

In this year when age verification is being implemented, political porn is more important than ever. LPFF wants to show even more, and resist even more, at this year's festival.

I'm overjoyed to announce that I have been asked to be the Guest of Honour at the second London Porn Film Festival! The LPFF is an annual festival celebrating queer, feminist, radical and experimental porn from around the world, and this year it runs from Thurs 12th til Sun 15th April - starting tonight! - at The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury.

I attended last year's festival and did a Q&A on the films I screened, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to watch lots of diverse, exciting and hot queer porn. You can read press coverage and my comments on last year's event here, and my blogpost about the new experience of creating audio descriptions for my films here.

I am delighted that the festival is returning this year, and excited that it's going from strength to strength. There's a larger programme, more films, and a choice of two workshops, one of which I'll be facilitating - my popular DIY Porn workshop which will be held on Friday (tomorrow) at noon. Making your own porn can enable you to express yourself, enjoy your body, embrace your sexuality, and have fun! Come along for some tips on how to create hot, inclusive porn, and see some sexy clips to showcase some different approaches to DIY porn. I really enjoyed giving this workshop on Valentine's Day and can't wait to do it again - here's my write-up from the last one. There are still a few places left so don't miss out - get your tickets here!

I've recently made some decisions about the future for me and for Dreams of Spanking.

'We've been together a long time. It's been six and a half years since you opened for business, and I was working and planning for two years before that. You are a labour of love, and before ATVOD came calling, you were a pleasure. I was passionate about you and preferred you to any other project. But under the present circumstances the weight of obligation is growing increasingly heavy'.

I’m SO happy that London has *finally* got its very own London Porn Film Festival, courtesy of those fabulous queers over at Wotever World <3 It’s on next week from Friday to Sunday (April 7-9), and I’m delighted that they are showing two Dreams of Spanking films: Please May I Come, Mistress and Queer as in Fuck You. Even better, I shall be there to do some Q&As! Ever since I first attended the amazing Berlin Porn Film Festival in 2014, I’ve longed for a London equivalent to showcase radical queer porn in its many beautiful diverse forms, so this is super exciting - please help me support it so it can become an annual event!

Please May I Come, Mistress is part of a 100-minute programme with seven other shorts under the title ‘A Thousand Queer Sexualities - films that span a breadth of erotic possibilities, and at the same time subverts them and swerves past the easy answers’. This film screens alongside Since You Asked So Nicely by Ms Naughty at Bright Desire, starring myself and Parker Marx in my first published boy/girl scene - which is queerer than you might expect.

When I started making spanking films I never once imagined that I would get a chance to screen them at the British Film Institute. Porn - especially queer porn and fetish porn, and Dreams of Spanking is firmly in both camps - is in many ways innately counter-cultural. When I launched the site I didn't expect the draconian criminalisation that would follow; but equally I didn't expect that queer porn, specifically my queer spanking films, would be considered cultural enough to be shown somewhere like the BFI.

It's a bittersweet juxtaposition, perfectly illustrated by something I noticed when I arrived at the BFI for Flare, the LGBTQ film festival, at which I was taking part in a panel discussion around how porn law affects queer porn. The banner across the Flare reception desks proclaimed the sponsors of the event; and there on the left was the legend "Supported by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport." How ironic that the very department of the civil service supporting this event is the one which introduced a statutory instrument in 2014 criminalising many forms of queer porn, including my own. It was surreal to speak about that criminalisation, to a sympathetic audience eager to learn how they can resist state oppression, at an event supported by the very public body responsible for that oppression. For me, that dissonance aptly summarised the widening gap between legislation imposed from above by those who have no clue about sexuality or sex work, and an increasingly open-minded public who mostly consider the sex lives of consenting adults to be their own damn business.

Before the panel proper, I recorded a video interview alongside queer porn icon Jiz Lee, and Chocolate Chip, who stars in Snapshot, the new "porn noir" sexy whodunnit by Shine Louise Houston, with questions asked by Flare programmer Jay Bernard. Jay is one of the curators of the festival, and they did an amazing job co-ordinating the Sexit panel and programming queer films that center people of colour. The interview was intended to be streamed via Facebook Live, but apparently the BFI is an old old building with shitty connectivity, so it was recorded instead - I'll link the video as soon as it's available.

I recently gave an interview to fellow feminist porn producer, the fabulous Erika Lust, which is now available on her website, complete with some pictures and sexy gifs! We talked about how I make my porn ethical; how Dreams of Spanking is at risk from the Digital Economy Bill here in the UK; how many of the fetish acts which seem to have been highlighted as “unacceptable” are those specific to female domination porn; feminism and submission; BDSM in the mainstream, and more. It had to be cut for length, but just for you dear readers here is the interview in full:

Hi Pandora! It's so great to talk to a woman on the same mission as myself to change the face of porn, *virtual high five* :) Now down to business. Your work has been described as "ethically produced fetish content" on your site Dreams of Spanking. Can you explain a little what this means?

Happy new year! It's traditional to do an end of year review, and I've been chewing over my 2016 one. Damn, it was a hell of a year; comparable in craziness only to the year before it. Here are the headlines:

I attended meetings in Parliament with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport discussing the age verification policy, and with the Liberal Democrat policy committee to consult about sex work and porn policy more generally. On request, I submitted my research into age verification to the Lib Dems to help inform their policy on online porn.

I taught a workshop on how to get started making DIY porn for The School of Erotic Mysteries (I still owe the participants the promised showreel from the shooting we did at the end of the day; what with reopening Dreams of Spanking and campaigning against the Digital Economy Bill, I sadly haven't had time to edit anything extra)

I went to Eroticon 2016, gave two talks, shot a documentary (see above; I'm hoping to finally find time to edit and publish it before Eroticon 2017, but we'll see), gave a spanking and caning demo, and shot a spontaneous porn film in a hotel room

I produced and directed three shoots for Dreams of Spanking - with Zak Jane Keir and Charlie J Forrest at Eroticon in April, with Nimue Allen and Tai Crimson in London in July, and with Adele Haze, Molly Malone and Amelia Jane Rutherford for a super-exciting (and very nearly finished!) Victorian feature film, which was written and backed by a private sponsor and will be out on Dreams of Spanking soon...

The article has received over one and a half thousand comments - and I was pleasantly astonished to discover that the majority of them are sympathetic or supportive. It seems that many people share my outrage that the Government think it a worthwhile use of time and money to legislate what consenting adults do for fun - or think that this bill is a proportionate, workable answer to the problems emerging from young people's lack of sex education.

On Monday it was officially announced that I'd won my appeal to Ofcom against the ATVOD decision that forced Dreams of Spanking offline last year. "Congratulations!" people have been saying, "You must be over the moon." And so I reply that I am. I tell the papers that I'm overjoyed, because that's the story: I fought the law, and I won. This is my moment of triumph. Of course I'm delighted.

But how does it really feel?

Even here - my blog that is more political than personal these days, but still the closest thing I have to an online journal - I'm not sure if I should stick to the "official" story. You want to hear how happy I am, right? And I am happy. I am. I think. But the truth is that with events this huge, processing emotions can be more complicated than that. I've been struggling to access my happiness over the last few weeks, since I first found out that I was going to win. I thought that it would all connect up on Monday, when the win was announced, but I still find myself feeling weirdly ambivalent. And hey, this blog has always been about authenticity, so you get to hear all about it.

FEMINIST PORN MAKER THRASHES CENSOR

Pandora Blake, award-winning activist and feminist pornographer, has won her appeal to Ofcom against ATVOD and can reinstate her site Dreams of Spanking, which was banned under the AVMS guidelines in August 2015, triggering widespread anger among free speech advocates as well as porn fans.

The controversial Audiovisual Media Services Regulations came into effect in December 2014, banning consensual sex acts from online porn including facesitting, female ejaculation, and spanking that leaves marks. Pandora Blake took part in the 'facesitting protest' outside Westminster, and also spoke on Newsnight and Women's Hour challenging the sexist and regressive nature of the regulations. She believes that speaking out made her a target for censorship.